Mary Roach - Early Life

Early Life

Roach was raised in Etna, New Hampshire. She received a bachelor's degree in psychology from Wesleyan University in 1981. After college, Roach moved to San Francisco, California, and spent a few years working as a freelance copy editor. She worked as a columnist, and also worked in public relations for a brief time. Her writing career began while working part-time at the San Francisco Zoological Society, producing press releases on topics such as elephant wart surgery. On her days off from the SFZS, she wrote freelance articles for the San Francisco Chronicle's Sunday Magazine.

From 1996 to 2005 Roach was part of The Grotto, a San Francisco based project and community of working writers and filmmakers. It was in this community, that Roach would get the push she needed to break into book writing. While being interviewed by Alex C. Telander, of BookBanter, Roach answers the question of how she got started on her first book:

A few of us every year would make predictions for other people, where they'll be in a year. So someone made the prediction that, 'Mary will have a book contract.' I forgot about it and when October came around I thought, I have three months to pull together a book proposal and have a book contract. This is what literally lit the fire under my butt.